The future of gaming isn’t a box, but rather a place: The cloud. And it will arrive before the end of 2019. So says Google Inc., which unveiled a potentially disruptive new game platform called Stadia during a keynote speech at the Game Developers’ Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.
Stadia servers will be powered by a new graphics processing unit developed in partnership with American semiconductor manufacturer AMD, Inc. Google claims its chips are capable of pushing out in excess of 10 teraflops — more than the combined computing power of Microsoft’s Xbox One X and Sony’s PlayStation 4 Pro — and will help deliver games in 4K HDR at 60 frames per second to players wherever they happen to be, regardless of the specifications of the device on which they’re playing.
But Google claims to have beaten this problem via a mix of cutting edge technology and a peerless network of data centres scattered across more than 200 countries. The majority of the world’s population lives within close enough proximity to these servers to keep their lag time low. “We have 7,500 locations,” said Harrison, “and they’re connected by a proprietary backbone of Google fibre optic cables covering hundreds of thousands of miles.
Google also used its GDC keynote to announce the founding of its own first-party game studio: Stadia Games and Entertainment. The new division will be headed up by Montreal-born Jade Raymond — best known for leading Ubisoft’s Toronto studio for five years — and charged with developing Stadia-exclusive software. There’s no word yet on what its first game will be.
It's gonna be a holy flop.